New 7th Sea Skills

Here's new and house-ruled skills from my old 7th Sea campaign. New knacks can be found here.

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Priest:

• Basic Knack: Ceremony [New]
• Basic Knack: Oratory
• Basic Knack: Scribe
• Basic Knack: Theology
• Advanced Knack : Apothecary [Vendel Sourcebook]
• Advanced Knack: First Aid
• Advanced Knack: History
• Advanced Knack: Incitation
• Advanced Knack: Philosophy
• Advanced Knack: Quack
• Advanced Knack: Singing
• Advanced Knack: Unobtrusive

This is a Skill that all men of the cloth should have. Some will also choose Scholar to accompany it, but not all of them will. Off the top of my head, I don't remember what exactly about the official Priest skill bugged me, but I imagine it had something to do with it not granting Knacks a Medieval-to-Restoration Priest just ought to have access to, ala my recent rant.

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Musketeer:

• Basic Knack: Etiquette (see Player's Guide, page 147)
• Basic Knack: Law
• Basic Knack: Mathematics
• Basic Knack: Politics
• Advanced Knack: Cold Read (see Player's Guide, page 145)
• Advanced Knack: Diplomacy
• Advanced Knack: History
• Advanced Knack: Interrogation
• Advanced Knack: Oratory
• Advanced Knack: Seneschal
• Advanced Knack: Shadowing (see Player's Guide, page 148)

This I know was intimately tied in to the topic of my recent rant. This Skill covers all the Civil Knacks a Musketeer must have to perform their duties as per the Montaigne Sourcebook. Said book has a cute little section where they talk about all the things a Musketeer is trained in, but making a starting character who had access to all those Knacks would have previously used a stupidly large chunk of your Character Points. Now all they need is this Skill and Fencing.

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Governor

• Basic Knack: Law
• Basic Knack: Leadership (see GM's Guide)
• Basic Knack: Politics
• Basic Knack: Scheming
• Advanced Knack: Accounting
• Advanced Knack: Bribery
• Advanced Knack: Cold Read (see Player's Guide, page 145)
• Advanced Knack: Diplomacy
• Advanced Knack: History
• Advanced Knack: Oratory
• Advanced Knack: Sincerity
• Advanced Knack: Threaten [New]
• Advanced Knack: Writing

Includes the Knacks necessary to govern a remote province or city. I created this one for similar reasons to Priest and Musketeer, but also because I had an NPC nobleman who'd inherited a family position in a remote province, despite not really having a previous background as a Courtier or Commander. These seemed like things he was likely to have learned on the job over the years.

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Whip:

• Basic Knack: Attack (Whip)
• Advanced Knack: Threaten [New]
  
• Advanced Knack: Swinging

Adding Swinging allowed Whip-wielding PCs to pulling basic Indiana Jones tricks without buying the Athlete Skill separately to track down a single Advanced Knack.

For the record, I require the character to have their Whip in hand in order to use Threaten, unless they also have another skill that grants access to that knack.

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Shield:

• Basic Knack: Parry (Shield)
• Basic Knack: Cover (Shield) [New]
  
• Advanced Knack: Attack (Shield)

I ignore the rule in the Vendel sourcebook concerning ranged attacks and shields, and instead have a Shield use the new Cover (Shield) Knack

Porte Knacks

More knacks. These are for Porté, the deliciously creepy gateway sorcery of Montaigne in 7th Sea. They amount to the totality of my house rules for Porté.

• Attunement [Porté] This is now the Knack used for Walking.

Attunement was an existing knack, which I house-ruled to expand and include the former Walk knack. The Walk knack was goofy, the requirements for Journeyman level were weird and Attunement was kinda weak. In order to get to the Adept Mastery Level, you had to raise your Walk knack to level 4, but since you couldn't use it (the Walk knack) until you were an Adept, it was hard to justify that. Eliminating the Walk knack solved all that.

Edit: I just realized how silly that reads if you don't know much about Porté. Obviously, you don't roll to stroll across the room. Walking, in this sense, means traveling through the wounds of reality to cross the misty void. It's a little like teleportation, but much creepier.

Here's a new Knack I made to handle other Porté issues:

• Guide [Porté] This Knack is the max number of people you can lead through the mists at once. If you fail an Attunement roll, you must roll Guide for each person you are leading. Scoring less than a 15 means they are lost in the mists forever, scoring 15-24 means they go temporarily insane. Only a 25+ delivers that individual safely and unharmed if you blew the Attunement/Walk roll.
  

A different kind of Knack

7th Sea uses the term Knack to mean sub-skills, and they often allow for minor tricks you can do with a skill. They're rated 1-5, and grant dice.

(Scion also uses the term Knack to represent minor tricks, though the scale of Scion makes use of the word minor rather debatable. The tend to be rather powerful, actually. Instead of being derived from Skills, Scion Knacks are derived from Epic Attributes, which are rated 1-11 and greatly overpower dice. I've written up many Scion knacks on these pages.)

Below, are some minimalist descriptions of some Knacks I'd made for 7th Sea, and used in the Viola campaign. The format is: "Knack name [Skill name] Description." Unless otherwise stated, assume all are counted as Advanced Knacks.

• Ceremony [Priest or Skald] Used to flawlessly conduct any Ceremony or Ritual in your respective religion
• Cover (Shield) [Shield (not buckler)] This knack may be used as Passive Defense against all Ranged Attacks, and Active Defense against Thrown Weapons
• Duck [Grenadier] This knack may be used with your Panache Roll to avoid the brunt of an explosion.
• Innuendo [Courtesan, Courtier, Criminal, Spy, Streetwise] Roll Wits plus this knack to cleverly get a point across to someone without having to spell it out.
• Jester [Courtier, Performer] Roll Panache plus this knack when you seek to lighten a crowd, crack a joke, or taunt an adversary.
• Obstruct [Wrestling] This may be used as your Defense Knack (Passive or Active) when you have an opponent in a grapple.
• Puzzle Sword [Merchant (Swordsmith), Fencing] This knack may be used with Lore Checks and Activation Rolls concerning Puzzle Swords and their Makers.
• Syrneth Lore [Scholar] This knack may be used with Lore Checks and Activation Rolls concerning the Syrneth and their Artifacts.
• Threaten [Criminal, Governor, Spy, Whip] This knack may be used with Resolve Rolls in Intimidation Attempts. See 7th Sea Players Guide page 193.

In addition, I house-ruled the following Knack to make it more meaningful and worthwhile:

• Reload (Firearms) [Firearms] Modified from Player's Guide: Each Rank subtracts 3 actions from the Reload Time.
  

If memory serves correctly, these Grenadier knacks are also house-rules, changes from the official knacks/rules to improve functionality or better simulate reality:

• Fuse (Grenade) [Grenadier] A Grenade detonates 1d10 phases after the fuse is lit. For each Rank you have in this knack, you may reroll that d10 once. The last die rolled is kept.
• Throw (Grenade) [Grenadier] When you throw a Grenade as an attack, roll this Basic knack. Lighting a Fuse is 1 Action. Throwing is a Second. Range = 5 plus (2 times your Brawn).